'Martial law' paranoids: I'm starting to gloat

Some of you out there make me feel like the traveling salesman who got home a day earlier than expected and was met by his 6-year-old son squalling that there was a naked man upstairs in Momma’s closet.

“Marvin,” said the father, “There’s no naked man in Momma’s closet.”

“Oh, yes there is!” wailed Marvin. After a few such exchanges the father grabbed the boy’s hand and said, “C’mon, Marvin, I’ll show you.” They proceeded up the stairs, and when the father opened the closet door, sure enough, there was his best friend crouched amidst the wardrobe; buck naked.

“For cryin’ out loud, Harry,” yelled the father. “Haven’t you got anything better to do than go around scaring little kids?”

Ever since a large segment of you readers have been quarreling with me over whether or not the Obama regime is plotting disorder in America to justify imposing martial law and canceling the elections, I’ve been dutifully “opening all the closet doors” to check. Unlike the chastened father in the story, there’s been no “there” there.

Let me restate my position. Even those who agree with me don’t use these words. Too strident. Sorry. I use them deliberately and raise my voice. You who fear Super-Shenanigan 001 have picked the wrong country. This is the USA and – here are the extremist words – It Can’t Happen Here!

And with less than 20 days to go before the voting, it’s time to launch “Gloat-Pack One.” This is not my final chortle on the matter; far from it. Gloat-Pack Five comes after the peaceful Inauguration.

Where is your “planned disorder”? Literally every hour that now elapses makes such a hateful act more and more suspicious, more and more obvious as an attempted “October Surprise” and Dirty Trick and less and less likely to succeed. Yes, this country has fallen far down from the country it once was; but it once was so great we can fall still a bit more and still say, with ground-kissing gratitude, “It can’t happen here!”

We’re seeing other things, however, as “closets” open day by day. We see a Romney-Obama debate that the experts dismissed as “a good night for Romney, worth a few-point bump for a few days.” They couldn’t understand at first that it signaled the dismantling of the aura of Obama’s political invincibility and would continue to do its anti-Obama mischief all the way to the end. The Romney-termites continue to feast on Obama-wood as a result of that first debate.

Then we saw, for the first time in our history, a vice president behave so dreadfully in debate that the entire scorekeeping mechanism melted down and disappeared into a two-word wrap-up: Biden failed.

We saw headlines that used the word “collapsed,” as in, “Obama’s Lead in Florida Collapsed.” We saw entire sections of the world show murderous hatred for America – a phenomenon that nevertheless failed to diminish big-media praise for Obama’s foreign policy. I grew up ridiculing the lying machines of dictators, not moaning at the obvious lies of my own country. George Haas, a prisoner of war of the Germans, told how his captors passed out a daily “newsletter” letting the American POWs know how the war was progressing. Each day offered glowing accounts of great German victories. George and his buddies quickly noticed, however, that each day’s German “victory” was a little closer to Berlin than the victory the day before! We out-fought the Nazis in the 1940s. It took decades before we learned to out-lie them.

There’s something supremely insulting about the insinuation that this beloved America has become the kind of country that spawns disorder leading to martial law leading to forgetting about elections. An insult that’s truthful remains true, but this one’s a lie. History is a kind of casino. And I’ve got all my chips on “It can’t happen here!”

One delightful thing did happen in the middle of all this. Only seldom do jokes come true, but the day after the Biden-Ryan debate White House press secretary Jay Carney was jumped by reporters demanding to know how Vice President Biden could say, “We didn’t know they were calling for more security at our consulate in Benghazi.” It was apparent that whoever his “we” were, were among the few on the planet who did not know that. Poor Carney said, “The vice president was speaking for himself and the president. He was not speaking for the administration.”

By that, Carney meant that the State Department knew all about the calls for added security, but note the wording: “He was not speaking for the administration.”

Ride with me back to the mid-1950s. President Dwight Eisenhower stumbled so badly throughout a White House press conference that his press secretary, James Hagerty, sank into depression. Afterwards, a Hagerty aide asked him, “We’ve got to put out a statement. What can we say?”

Hagerty thought for a moment and then said, “All we can say is, ‘The president does not speak for this administration!'”